jurisprudence

A federal district court in Oklahoma has ruled that the Obamacare statute means what it says: subsidies may not granted to people obtaining their health insurance through the federal exchange. In Pruitt v. Burwell, Judge Ronald White of the Eastern District of Oklahoma followed the reasoning of the panel in Halbig v. Sebelius, a ruling that the full D.C. Circuit, having been packed by the Democrats, recently vacated. The Oklahoma »

Call this the first fruits of the Obama-Reid plan to pack the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The DC Circuit has just vacated its July 22 decision in Halbig v. Burwell that struck down the federal subsidies for Obamacare in states that did not set up exchanges as the clear language of the statute said. The DC Circuit will now hear the case en banc, which likely favors a reversal »

Obamacare by its express and unambiguous terms limits Obamacare subsidies to people using health care exchanges “established by the State.” Thus, subsidies to people in the federal exchange are not permitted, as these exchanges obviously are not established by the State. However couched, the argument that subsidies should nonetheless accrue to people in the federal exchange boils down to the notion that the limiting language of the statute is the »

Wish I had time to get through the just issued DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling striking down the IRS twisting of the Obamacare statute’s clear language on state-based exchanges (I’m at the Reagan Library all this week doing a Gipper 101 course for high school teachers—see photo nearby of Sunday night’s opening talk—and I have to be off momentarily for this morning’s classes), but this looks to be HUGE, »

George Will seems to me the preeminent political columnist of our era, with the possible exception of Charles Krauthammer. Will and Krauthammer are in a league of their own. Both are conservatives, of course, and you have to wonder who the liberals can put up against them. Tom Friedman? Maureen Dowd? Paul Krugman? E.J. Dionne? I don’t know. I come to question Will, however, not to praise him. He has »

George Will’s latest column endorses judicial activism. He argues that judicial deference to the political process is misplaced because majorities should not enjoy a largely untrammeled right to make rules for everyone; because it’s not the case that most things legislatures do reflect the will of a majority; and because “government is almost never disinterested.” Ed Whelan offers what I consider a persuasive rebuttal to Will. He argues, as Will »

Reading a book on cross examination twenty years ago, I got interested in the Nuremberg trial. I followed up reading several books about the trial and then discovered that the whole trial transcript is accessible online. I read enough of the trial transcript to write an article about Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s famously failed cross examination of Hermann Goering. Could it really have been so bad? I wrote an »

Walter Olson holds down the fort over at the Cato Institute’s Overlawyered site, but he felt that this post exceeded the length appropriate for that site. With Walter’s permission, we are pleased to publish it here: What happens when the legal analysts at Slate get things flatly wrong, in the service of generating a desired ideological frisson for their liberal-minded readers? Does anyone act embarrassed or make humble noises about »

Today, the Senate is expected to vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to “prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Whatever the Senate does, the House almost certainly won’t pass the legislation. Thus, in a sense, the Senate vote is symbolic — a chance for Democrats to tempt Republicans into taking an increasingly unpopular position and a chance for some Republicans to »

In the early days of Power Line, we got word that a noted jurist liked the site, but thought we should write more about Court of Appeals decisions. My thought, as a practicing lawyer, was that Power Line was a vehicle for me to write about things other than court decisions. Since I’m no longer a practicing lawyer, my only excuse for not writing about Court of Appeals decisions is »

I wrote here about Judge Richard Posner’s “weak and inappropriate mea culpa,” wherein he declared that he made a mistake in upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law. But now, Judge Posner denies that he is recanting that opinion. In a post on the New Republic’s website called “I Did Not ‘Recant’ on Voter ID laws,” he asserts: I did not say [in Reflections on Judging] that my decision, and the Supreme Court’s »

Four separate pending lawsuits suits, filed in various federal district courts, challenge the legality of a crucial IRS rule authorizing tax credits for the purchase of health insurance on federally run health care exchanges. Each suit alleges that the IRS rule contravenes the plain text of the ACA (Obamacare) because the statute only authorizes tax credits (and subsidies) for the purchase of insurance in an exchange “established by a state” »

Judge Richard Posner, in his latest book Reflections on Judging, has declared that he made a mistake in upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law. Posner wrote the majority opinion in the case. The decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3 with the lead opinion by Justice Stevens. Judge Posner blames the lawyers for his mistake — always a good ploy. In an interview, he claimed that the »

Dez Wells is the best basketball player on the University of Maryland’s men’s team. He came to Maryland after being kicked out of Xavier University due to allegations that he sexually assaulted a female student. My first reaction to Wells’ transfer was disappointment that the team I support would accept a player deemed morally unsuitable by his prior school. But it quickly became apparent to me that Xavier treated Wells »

Former NFL star Chad Johnson (known as Chad Ochocinco for a time during his playing days) was sentenced to 30 days in jail for a probation violation in a domestic violence case (he head-butted his wife). Johnson was set to serve no jail time, thanks to a plea bargain. But the judge rejected the deal after Johnson slapped his attorney’s backside when the judge asked him if he was satisfied »

There’s this much to be said in praise of Jonathan Turley, professor of “public interest law” at George Washington University Law School, and frequent bobblehead on cable TV shows: at least he isn’t a supercilious smug-mugger like Jeffrey Toobin. In addition, unlike Toobin, Turley often gets things right. But come on man, you’re only just discovering now that the federal administrative bureaucracy—the “fourth branch of government”—has become problematic? From Turley’s »

At the moment I am listening to the ostentatiously liberal Judge Mark Bennett of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa summarize the Supreme Court’s employment law decisions of the past year. Judge Bennett wants us to know that he has got his mind right (i.e., left), and how. I understood that from his disparagement of the conservative Supreme Court justices as “the usual suspects.” That »